I found sleep impossible. How had the earring come to be down there by the fish ponds? Only if the owner had been there.
She might have walked to the fish ponds. It was some way from Rooks’ Rest and I had never seen her out walking; she was not the sort of person to take long tramps in the countryside.
Just suppose she was dead. Suppose she was murdered. What of Maisie? Where was she? Were the scandalmongers suggesting that she too had been murdered? Perhaps the idea of one body being thrown into the ponds was plausible. But two? I remembered then that Jason Verringer had told me how an ancestor of his had once disposed of a rival by throwing his body into the fish ponds after killing him. “The river is swift running and only a few miles from the sea.” He had said something like that.
And then the child? What of the child? She was in the care of Mrs. Gittings on Dartmoor, but she could not stay there indefinitely without arrangements being made.
